Taking a step back we know the success of the project depends on the amount of attention given to resource planning. Project budgets and schedules are managed off the careful planning of the resources required to complete the project. One way to assure accuracy of the estimate for resources is to ask the team to figure out the hours.

Respond to one of the following bullet points:

• How should budgeting, scheduling, and resource loading or leveling be most logically accomplished in terms of their chronological order? How would resource-constrained scheduling help, hinder, or change your recommendations?
• What are some potential problems with the top-down and bottom-up budgeting processes? What are some ways of dealing with these potential problems? In preparing a budget, what indirect costs should be considered?
• What characteristic(s) of the critical path times makes them critical? What two factors are compared by Gantt charting? How does the Gantt chart differ in purpose from the project master schedule?
• Contrast total slack and free slack. What is the average resource load factor? How is it used to determine project completion times? What are two methods for addressing the constrained resource allocation problem?